The Hungarian Connection

One Architect's Path to Shanghai

By

Mishi Saran

Updated May 28, 2009 11:59 p.m. ET

In the early 1930s I.M. Pei, then a teenager, walked out of the Grand Theatre on Shanghai's West Nanjing Road after a movie, glanced up -- and was spellbound. The Park Hotel, next door to the theater, was the tallest building in town, a splendid Art Deco specimen that soared powerfully over a low-slung city. The young man who would go on to design famous structures around the world says it played a key role in his decision to become an architect.

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A villa designed by Mr. Hudec for the Wu family in Shanghai
Stefan Irvine for the Wall Street Journal

Still an imposing presence 75 years later, the hotel is just one of more than 65 Shanghai buildings -- many of them city landmarks, in a rich variety of styles -- designed by L&aacute;szl&oacute; Ede Hudec.

"The Chinese think of Hudec as a Shanghainese architect," says Judit Hajba, cultural and education affairs consul at the Hungarian Consulate in Shanghai.

By birth he was Hungarian, son of a prosperous family in Beszterceb&aacute;nya, a city in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The city now lies in the heart of Slovakia, where it's called Bansk&aacute; Bystrica. When Mr. Hudec washed up in Shanghai as a 25-year-old in November 1918, stateless and recently escaped from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, he hardly seemed like a man who would put his own remarkable stamp on the cityscape. But Shanghai in those days was bursting with new ideas and throbbing with opportunity; it was a city where traders, travelers, adventurers and refugees of all nationalities found an open door.

"He was the right man in the right place at the right time," Ms. Hajba says.

Businesses both local and foreign flourished in the semicolonial city, where Western powers had clawed out territories and concessions from a flagging Qing dynasty in the years before its 1911 collapse. Scrambling to his feet, Mr. Hudec got a job with an American architectural firm, R.A. Curry, putting to use his degree in architecture from the Royal Joseph Technical University in Budapest, which was modeled on L'&Eacute;cole des Beaux-Arts Paris.

"You can see Hudec never forgot his classical training, always ensuring his buildings had the right proportions; even the Park Hotel is divided into a base, a middle and a top section," says Anne Warr, architect and author of "Shanghai Architecture."

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László Ede Hudec
Courtesy of Hudec Heritage Project

Mr. Hudec's path to Shanghai had begun in 1914, when the new graduate enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army at the outbreak of World War I. In a skirmish with the Russians, he was captured by Cossacks and sent as a POW to Siberia. With his gift for languages -- he picked up Polish, Russian, English and French along the way, on top of the Slovak, Hungarian and German he already spoke -- he was able to wangle a fake Russian passport and then escape to Harbin in northeast China, where he exchanged his documents for a frontier pass that allowed travel within China and Japan.

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Mr. Hudec's plan when he arrived in boomtown Shanghai was to make some money, and then go home. But his work in R.A. Curry's bustling office was exciting, and promotions came rapidly. The firm tackled schools, offices, private homes and commercial buildings, picking up awards for their proposals on the way. Mr. Hudec was particularly fond of his work on a building commissioned by the American Club in China that housed offices for the American Chamber of Commerce and space for the LaSalle Extension University. Years later, for a period, it became the Shanghai High People's Court. The box-like eight-floor structure had dark brown bricks as facing tiles on the outside walls, a style that became popular in Shanghai in the 1930s. The building was mostly American Georgian Revival, with its characteristic, symmetrical rows of windows on each floor. On the top floor, Mr. Hudec placed a row of seven white-marble-arched Palladian windows to form a decorative arcade.

Mr. Hudec decided to stay on in Shanghai. He married Gizella, the Shanghai-born daughter of a German businessman, and started his own firm. He designed homes and offices for foreigners and, increasingly, for wealthy Chinese businessmen and politicians.

Sir Robert Ho Tung, a powerful half-English magnate whose commercial empire straddled Shanghai and Hong Kong, commissioned a Shanghai home from Mr. Hudec, who gave it a south-facing porch with graceful Ionic columns. The building had pilasters, French windows and a shallow balcony with an iron balustrade; the yard featured a rock garden and labyrinths. It was a harmonious marriage of East and West. Later, Sir Robert's home became the Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House.

Mr. Hudec arrived in Shanghai at the end of World War I "in a city that wanted to change, and he wanted to change with it," Ms. Warr says. "He was interested in designing in a new way for a new world."

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Stefan Irvine for the Wall Street Journal

In 1927 came what Ms. Warr calls a seminal point for the architect: a trip to the U.S. that produced a midcareer shift. He came back from California, Chicago and New York City with a notebook full of sketches and a head full of ideas.

"He began to move his style away from the classical toward Art Deco and Modernism," she says.

Later, Mr. Hudec would acknowledge the debt that his design for the Park Hotel owed to New York's American Radiator Building; built in 1924, it's now called the American Standard Building, and houses the Bryant Park Hotel. The Park Hotel in Shanghai also embodied cutting-edge technology, from its dishwashers and Otis elevators down to its foundation.

The Shanghai standard at the time, Ms. Warr says, was to build atop timber piles driven into the muddy earth. "For the Park Hotel," she says, "Hudec specified a new steel-sheet piling system, which prevented the building from sinking as the buildings along the Bund had done."

With the turmoil of civil war engulfing China, Mr. Hudec left Shanghai in 1947, moving first to Italy and then to California, where he died in 1958. The Communists took over China in 1949, and the curtain fell across Mr. Hudec's work for decades.

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